You have to be quite brave to wear an all-white tent dress with a round neck – even if it is Valentino. La Plante greets me from a corner booth in her creamy beige hotel in Los Angeles and says “I’m ready for my pre-med,” referring to her designer dress that looks like a hospital gown and bursts into cackling giggles. Lynda La Plante is brave in so many ways. And funny.

Her original TV series Widows was one of televisions most watched in the 1980s over 18 million viewers. It was an event. Landmark TV, story of an all-female heist, unknowns cast as leads who later would become household names like Ann Mitchell who played Dolly Rawlins (Eastenders)

Widows has now been made into a powerful movie by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) starring Viola Davies, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell and Elisabeth Debicki. The movie is quite different from the TV series – for instance it’s set in modern day Chicago and a name has been changed – Dolly is now Veronica – but the premise is the same. Three armed robbers blow themselves up in a failed heist and the wife of the crimes leader discovers his notebook and detailed plans for jobs and they team up with the other widows to finish the men’s work. The film is exciting, sexy, powerful, emotional with all of the unexpected punches of the original – already an Oscar buzz about it and the film opened the London Film Festival on October 10th.

La Plante is here in Los Angeles pitching a different TV series to various networks and enjoying the gentle afterglow of the Widows buzz as well she deserves – last year was a terrible year where she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. ITV commissioned a prequel to Prime Suspect, Tennison 1973, which centred around the young DC Tennison, the character that was to make Helen Mirren a superstar and Lynda La Plante a force to be reckoned with. The ITV version had almost no force at all. La Plante had to take her name off it. It was humiliating.

La Plante does humiliation well – as long as she’s telling the story. She comes to the West Coast for TV meetings but not that often. She has homes in the UK and in the Hamptons on the East Coast, thus has never got to know California.

“A few years ago, before sat nav, I had to drive to Montecito for lunch. Because I have no sense of direction I got up really early and drove off in a rented little sports car. Lunch with my friend was at 12.30 but I got there at 9.30. So, I thought I’ll just go and sit by their pool and let myself in to this very elegant place, changed in the pool house, helped myself to beautiful iced drinks from the fridge and fluffy towels. I was there quite a while when someone came out and said, ‘Who are you?’ I’m Lynda La Plante and he said, ‘You are in the wrong house.’ I used their suntan cream, their towels, their drinks and my friend lived a few doors down. By the time I got to her I was still an hour early.”

She laughs loudly at herself, almost frightening the waitress who is bringing the coffee. The breakfast at the wrong house anecdote gives more than a clue to who she is. A woman who doesn’t care if she’s out of place. She’ll just get on with it. The more you know her, the more you realise she has all the bravery of the tough women heroines she’s created and all of the heart.

La Plante was born in Liverpool in 1943, a middle child with an older brother and younger sister. She was an actress until she created and wrote the series Widows, followed by the sequel She’s Out. She spent years in prisons, bordellos, mortuaries for research. Her first novel The Legacy was published in 1987. More international best sellers came and in 1991 she created Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. She has 3 Baftas and two Emmy’s for Prime Suspect and was awarded a CBE in 2008.

Her father was devoted to the gold course, her mother loved sports and was buried in a Liverpool shirt. She wouldn’t watch anything of Lynda’s on TV if it clashed with the football. When Prime Suspect was on its third series, she once asked ‘Did you write that?’

La Plante continues, “I’m here (in LA) because of Widows (seeing final screenings) and I’m pitching a series with Tom Fontana (Emmy winning writer/producer of Homicide: Life on The Street, St Elsewhere and Borgia). All the studios say they don’t want anything quite as violent as I’m used to. Then they keep saying how do I see the second season, the third season…”

We agree that the golden age of the box set is perhaps over forever and why can’t there just be one good series?

She is used to being a lone voice in a room where she’s pitching. ITV questioned her creative control as a writer/producer/show runner. They wanted the Tennison character, but it seems nothing else of La Plante. She found it shocking.

“Because I didn’t have control at casting, at producing, getting the crew… It used to be a joy to me. Being an actress for so long I knew intuitively if someone was good. (She trained at RADA, worked with the RSC and was on TV in Z Cars and The Sweeney) I love actors. Sam James the casting director walked out, couldn’t take it. The abuse I saw during the casting was really quite something. The director would say do it again, do it again, do it again but without any notes. He didn’t believe in notes.”

There’s a smell of calm in the creamy beige hotel and fresh floral arrangements but still a smell of outrage in our booth. Does she feel that it would be a lot different if the casting had taken place just after the events of #metoo rather than just before? She laughs, “Yes, it would have been much better.”

Did she feel dismissed as a woman? Dismissed because she’s not young? (She’s 75) She doesn’t know which it is. She’s not used to being dismissed. All her projects have involved prodigious research. Her knowledge of police and police procedure is phenomenal and outside of that she is credited with discovering the then unknown Idris Elba when she cast him in The Governor and a young Paul Bettany in Killer Net. Perhaps the other producers were slightly in awe of her, afraid of her?

“No, they were just amateurs. Scared of any decisions or any risk,” she dismisses.

“Someone at ITV found an actor that they wanted to play the lead but I said, “He can’t act,” and they said, “But he’s very attractive.”I said, “He can’t walk and talk at the same time,” and they said, “You don’t understand, he’s very attractive.” He was cast and by the time the reviews came out I had walked.One of the reviews said when the bomb went off in the bank and this actor was burnt he probably burned up very quickly because he was so wooden!I cut it out and sent it to them.” More giggling.

Some people might have thought this was childish. For her it seems a small triumph. She doesn’t care if she never works for ITV again. The original Widows was on Thames (ITV). She says you could never get it on TV now. She cast black people and mixed-race people in leads rather as maids and butlers and in the eighties this was in itself a revolution. She was always a woman ahead of her time. That must be why she clashed with the male bosses at ITV.

“No, I think they were egocentric amateurs. That’s it. They wanted to do what they wanted to – whatever I wanted they didn’t care.”

Would it have made a difference if she was a man? There’s a pause as long as you could smoke a cigarette in.

“Probably,” she concedes. “The emotions of stress and frustration was difficult to deal with. I felt heartbroken. I had spent so long working with the old cops, so much research…(all of her input dismissed). What was the most shocking of all was when the man who commissioned it had lunch with me at the Ivy. I said I’ve got all the material, I’ve got Jane Tennison, I’ve written a book. He looked at me and said ‘Unfortunately for you, you don’t own these characters. We do and if we wanted to make our own series of Jane Tennison we could. We wouldn’t do that,’ but that’s exactly what they did. From day one they wanted me out.

“Franchise of the novel continues and they are huge worldwide. I own the other characters and two other production companies have liked them and I’m in talks to develop a series around them.

“ITV also decided to change the killer and not kill another character off. I was bypassed at every single level so I took my name away. John Heyman (producer who died recently and father of Harry Potter super producer David) told me, ‘don’t waste a second being angry. You want revenge, be a success.”

Indeed, she’s now on book number 4, Murder Mile, in a series of 10 Tennison books which is about to drop. Widows has been re-released and a best seller in many countries, with new territories added almost weekly. She’s in the Best Seller list of several countries every week. She’s pitching her new crime show with Fontana which she says is exciting and the book Widows continues to roll. In Australia it’s already in its 6th reprint. Rights have been sold everywhere from Japan to Russia. Widows the novel has been expanded and enhanced from the original work and it’s still a ripping read.

Although she is not officially on the payroll for Widows the movie, she is ultimately the creator of these characters and as thus she is able to bathe in the large pools of its success.

She smiles. “The extraordinary development is that Widows is rearing its head like a monster…

“I met Steve McQueen at an event at Buckingham Palace honouring members of the Royal Academy.John Hurt was there.He had this shaggy moustache, maybe it was for a film and his hair was standing on end.He took me aside and said, ‘Everybody here looks so fucking old,’ and he died a few weeks later.”

La Plante is more than aware of time passing. Friends Lynda Bellingham and Cilla Black both now gone means she doesn’t want to lose a day, an hour even. At the same party, McQueen came up to her. “Are you Lynda LaPlante,” he said.I didn’t know who he was. He is quite a formidable person, large.He said, “My name is Steve McQueen,’ and he had just made 12 Years a Slave.He said, “I have been obsessed with Widows since I was a child.’ He told me how he watched it as a teenager and it stayed with him. It was dormant in him and he’d like to make a movie.And I thought that would be absolutely incredible.He has been so respectful.” La Plante didn’t write the script but she was consulted at every turn.

“The notes sessions were incredible, where did you find these women?,” he would ask. “And I went through all the lives of all the women I had met in prison and he was, ‘Tell me more, more, more.’ He sent the script and I had a lot of notes, every note that I had he would say, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and that is how we worked.

“He is quite boyish when he wants something.He said, ‘You have a lot of humour.Why do you have this humour?’ and we laughed.And I said, ‘If you laugh with somebody you like them.’ Dolly Rawlins comes over as hard hitting like a hammer, but she’s got to make mistakes and jokes so you like her. In the movie she is Ronnie. If you were making this for TV first off, they’d say Dolly Rawlins has got to be Olivia Coleman and the glamorous one would have to have several TV credits.

The film so far has been receiving rave reviews. Producer Eain Canning says “I did not set out to write a film about diversity but we knew we had a very significant female voice echoing the original. This is a contemporary love letter to Lynda’s Widows. She very definitely has a voice in it. We wanted to make sure that the original spirit was there so she was part of the process. We didn’t set out to make a film about diversity but that is Chicago. We simply reflected what we saw on the streets. Steve and I are equally surprised that people are surprised that this story connects with audiences, just like Lynda’s TV show connected. It’s crazy that in 2018 we’re still talking about it being abnormal to have a film with female leads. Hopefully it will be the last time people focus on this.”

It’s almost as if the feminist clock had been ticking backwards and that there was more freedom for women in television in the eighties.

“When I originally cast Eva Motley (British born Barbadian actress in the role of Bella), the casting director was nervous because she had just come out of prison.I remember reading something about Lauren Bacall when she first worked with Bogart she found it very difficult to lift her eyes, she looks down and then up (she mimics this and looks quite Princess Diana) I noticed that Eva did that. She had a gruff voice, yet this vulnerability.Director Ian Toington was a man who loved women and said, ‘I think she is scared but wonderful.’

It was a risk, that nowadays, she would not be allowed to take.

“I see Eva every day of my life in a poster in my office. She committed suicide before the second series.Every time I think about her, I always want to make a film in her memory.”

Now this fearless, tiny juggernaut of a woman, a woman who’s been chopped down and always stood up again, has large tears rolling down her face.

“It was like her dream had come true and then it turned into a nightmare.”In many ways there are parallels here. La Plante’s dreamed of another TV series and then it became her nightmare.

“I’ll fight and I will be as strong as I can be.I have always been on my own, I have never had back up until recently where I have had people working close with me and it’s changed my life, that I could trust people.Going into those rooms pitching totally solo and I would be saying things like, ‘This girl is no good,’ and them saying, ‘Well we all like her.’”

Widows has been the opposite experience – inclusive and respectful. Although the is set in a different era, a different city, “the emotions are the same.” More than ever, it’s a movie that’s right for this time. It’s about women not putting up with abuse and being sidelined. It’s about women rising up and women doing it better.

“It’s quite violent.” But it’s a powerful, emotional, heart stopping use of violence. It’s interesting to her that in her recent pitching, the networks all seem to want the violence toned down or taken out altogether. They see it as gratuitous.

“The thing I have always disapproved of is gratuitous nudity. For example, in Tennison there was a 17-year old victim.We cast a young girl – in the script it very clearly states that the only thing you can see is her Biba boot. The police officer looks and says she is very young.She is covered, it’s raining.In the TV series you see her whole body. That girl was left naked for hours and hours.It’s abuse.There was an autopsy scene where this young naked girl lay on a trolley for ages while the crew drank coffee.That’s men, male directors, unasked for, unnecessary, abusive.I am very protective of actors.”

Does she think she could take an occasional acting role? In our meeting she’s done quite a few accents including five different Liverpudlian ones. “I don’t think I could act now, I walk into furniture because of my eye problems.”

In January she had cataract operations that went wrong.

“I had glasses everywhere. All over the house.I thought, oh I think I’ll have laser surgery.I went in to have the laser and they said,’ You are too old to have the laser, you have slight cataracts. What we can do is get rid of the cataract and insert lenses so you will never have to wear glasses again.Both eyes at the same time.Everybody I have met says you never have both eyes at the same time but off I went.”

Was this blind optimism or too busy to really think about it?

“Don’t know. They told me it’s just a couple of weeks recovery time and before that things will just be a bit blurred.After two weeks and drops and drops and drops in my eyes I still couldn’t see a thing.Morning, noon and night drops.‘Oh, you have a slight infection,’ they said.More drops.I told them I can’t judge dark from light, I fall over.‘Only to be expected.’ they said. They didn’t tell me that.The operation was January 10 and since then I have seen eight specialists.Some have said the lenses they inserted are problematic.They now tell me if they re-move the lenses I could be completely blind.

The Queen, she goes in, wears dark glasses for one day and it’s over. But not me. Lawyers are looking into it.I have become very fearful of them doing anything.I was in the garden and I thought, ‘There are an awful lot of bugs in this drink.’ I go inside, empty it out, fill the glass and they are still there, then I realise they are everywhere.It’s in my eyes.Little black dots everywhere.Then they told me it meant the retina was coming away.Another specialist said that apparently my right retina came away during the procedure but they pushed it back.

“I actually had the Queen’s surgeon look at me and he is the one that pointed out the possibility of blindness.It’s something about the lenses being stuck into the eye.Another surgeon said there is the possibility of placing a black lens in the eye and I said, ‘I would look very weird,’ and he said it would help my ability to judge day from night.

“You’d be amazed how many places have white walls and white tables.There is a new drug that costs $900 a month to help with that. I took it and it had absolutely no effect whatsoever.I deal with it by using a big magnifying glass and using very large print, like a children’s book.I have to have somebody to take me around the airport and into the plane.And all these meetings in these studios, they all have huge white tables. And I am sitting there thinking, they don’t know I can’t see them at all.”

Once again, we laugh almost hysterically as we both know it’s quite tragic. Is there no hope?

“There is hope that they would do one eye at a time to remove the lens.If the first eye goes blind then they won’t do the other one.I also have nightmare pain in the neck from a disc.”

She has had several procedures where steroids have been injected into the disc and she still can’t turn her neck properly when it flares up which is probably exacerbated by stress.

What makes her power through it?

“I don’t know.I have had five operations under anaesthesia where they shoot steroids into the dodgy disc and then they say we missed it.”

She is also on pain killers.

We order croissants, no jam because she’s a spiller, and wearing white. She’s like all the strong female boss characters she’s created and then some. I wonder, does she laugh a lot and make jokes to make you like her? She’s certainly very easy to talk to, kind. The eyes, the neck, the ITV. They’re all scary but she seems to have taken them in her stride. Perhaps she’s prolific because of the setbacks. It’s her way of working through the pain.

The first tidal wave of pain came when she was divorcing Richard La Plante in 1996. “When you go through amarital exposure… for me it was a betrayal of everything.The worst was my trusted PA.I kept saying to my lawyer, ‘I don’t understand how he knows everything I am earning.Every contract.’She was feeding him everything.They got married.”

How very All About Eve. No wonder trusting people is new to her.

She nods. “He had Raymond Tooth as his lawyer, an obnoxious little man (known for his ferocity in the court and nicknamed Jaws) and I had a man with a stammer!I was told to stay quiet and not say anything.

“Eventually I said, ‘How much do you want? Put it on the table.’ And I sold everything I had to get rid of him.But I wouldn’t let him have so much as a brick of my house. When it was over, the relief was immense.

“Richard was coming after me for the house in the Hampton’s and alimony for the rest of his life.I sold everything that I possessed so that he didn’t get a brick.But I didn’t have to give him his name back, that’s the only thing I got out of it.My name before was Marchal. It’s not a good name.What’s the best gift I have ever had?My divorce papers.I waited so long so I was glad for it to be over and to be free.And to be able to have my son.

“He wouldn’t let me adopt, I had had three miscarriages and he said no to adopting.It was over for me.I thought I have got to be very grown up and just accept it was over for me and babies.I got a great Dane.

“I remember the moment – I had gone to the States. Was at afriend’s house by the beach. The water came up almost into his yard and I saw this girl walking towards me and she had a two-year old on her hip.His little legs were moving and I remember thinking I will never have that.Whereas before I thought it’s too late, I’m too old, I thought I had accepted it but suddenly I felt such emotion. I thought that I had dealt with it but I hadn’t. When I got home there was a phone call from an attorney – when I had been hoping to adopt I had been listed with many attorneys, this one said, ‘we’ve got something for you, there is a baby being born in Florida, we don’t know if it’s male or female, the birth mother does not want any finances, she does not want to know or meet any adopters, she has not queried if it’s a single parent.Somehow you have risen to the top of the list. If you can be in Boca Raton by tomorrow morning, the baby is yours.’ So I left immediately from the Hampton’s to Boca Raton and the next morning I had my son.”

How interesting – the moment she gave up and let it all go, she got the call.She answers simply with the stream tears from her eyes,

“Perhaps other people would have queried it, saying I am bymyself now but I didn’t.When we were married he said, ‘We are not adopting.’ I didn’t have to turn anyone down, this was the first.I know my son (Lorcan now 15) finds it hard at school as he is always referred to as Lynda LaPlante’s adopted son.He hates that, he says, ‘I am your son.Why do they always say adopted?’

I promise her I will not use the phrase LLP’s adopted son.

“He says, ‘I am your son,’ and he is extraordinary. She can’t hide her pride in him. Does she fear that the birth mother will come looking for him?

“I hope that one day I will reunite her with him.At his Christening – I went to town, it was huge.I talked to the Archbishop who was doing the ceremony, I asked, ‘Can you please insert a prayer for the birth mother to be at peace with this?’ He said, ‘I have never had to do this before.’ And I said that I would appreciate it.And there wasn’t a person at the ceremony who didn’t feel it.

“I owe her 15 years of love from this extraordinary, naughty boy who is now in the Hamptons with his motorbike.He can’t go on the road, just on the grounds. He is gorgeous looking and very funny.He is very handsome, brown haired.He said, ‘Will I have a suit at the premiere?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘Not a Marks and Spencer’s one?’ He is quite a snazzy dresser.He is broad, he does rowing (I’ve seen them together and they look like they belong).

Since he was three he has had a girlfriend called Hailey, they met at summer camp and they have been together ever since. She looks like a young Kate Moss.They are a divine couple, beautiful together.She bosses him around.”

I’m sure Lorcan is a large part of her drive. Her east coast banker boyfriend has been gone about a year. “I got quite tired of when he came to London, get tickets for this, book Harry’s bar… I am not his secretary.He is very, very, social, Mr. Society, has all these huge parties.We had an enormous argument about a painting.I don’t know if you ever saw that play Art, where one of them has bought a white canvas.He bought a white canvas by… I said I don’t care who it’s by, you actually bought a white canvas.I cannot believe you would do that.So, I drew a little face on it and he went berserk.

“My house in The Hamptons is full of American Indian art.He would walk in and say, ‘Oh my God, the red Indians.Why have you got them in every room?’

She sent out for painkillers which have just arrived. She slips one down. Of course, never having complained

She has a library of her own intellectual property. In the library are outlines for a further 5 Tennyson books, outlines for Above Suspicion. I wonder why all these outlines laid out? She’s up at 5am every day – never stops. Is it because she thinks at 75, she might not have time to write all these books?

“No,” she says. She takes it in her stride. These days she can’t really see where she’s going, but she’s going there anyway. Any pain, any problems seem to disappear when she talks about her son. And when she talks about the kindness of Steve McQueen which seems to have totally compensated for the pain caused by ITV’s dismissive attitude.

“Steve gave it back to me.He constantly refers to the way we work together.He is generous to me.He sent me the most amazing flowers saying, ‘Thank you for your amazing notes.’ She smiles blissfully.

She worries that she might have to let go of things she cares about like her house in the Hampton’s, her 1970’s Mercedes.

“I can’t drive it now, butI hate letting go of things.I keep things because they make me remember exactly what I was doing when I got them. I keep doing bits of letting go.”

Is it because she’s testing how it feels to let go of the small things to see if she’s ready to let go of bigger things?

“I don’t think so,” she smiles, enjoying the ride even if she’s no longer driving the car.

I am waiting for Demi Moore in the lounge bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel. It’s velvety and dark. When she enters the room she takes it. It crackles with her arrival. Yet she is small alone, no entourage, no assistant, no publicist. Walking slightly oddly taking tiny steps with her legs a little too close together. She sinks to the velvet besides me. “Look. I bent over and popped a button on my skirt.” It’s a denim pencil skirt. She had to walk with a hobble because the last button, the one just above the knee was the one that had sped away leaving the skirt to open too wide and too high. She asks our waitress for a “half caff latte” and a sewing kit.

She is wearing a pretty chiffony blue and white blouse, her hair long and lustrous, her eyes small but glittering like dark diamonds. She has a presence but it’s not necessarily the one you’d expect, not in any way haughty or demanding. There’s a sweetness to her embarrassment of walking in a room with a broken skirt, not knowing who in that room was me.

She is instantly open, touchable. “I am in New York because my husband is shooting a movie here.” She uses the phrase “my husband” a lot and she shows you a soft glow as she says it. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore made big news when they got together because of the 15 year age gap. I tell her I’ve met him a couple of times and I found him very knowing, very sweet and the term old soul does not seem a cliche for him. “I agree with you on that. It’s a hard thing for me to describe exactly how he is. Who he is on a soul level has definitely lived beyond his now 29 years. There’s so much more that he just gets, even if he hasn’t had the physical experience he seems to have a knowing.” She smiles beatifically.

Demi Moore is softer, sweeter than you’d ever imagine. You sense though that she too has had a few lifetimes, a harsh upbringing, never in one place for long with alcoholic parents and a stepfather who committed suicide when she was 17. Plagued by illness throughout her childhood, driven into an imaginary world, a drive of super force that got her to Blame It On Rio. Engaged to Emilio Estevez in the Brat Pack heat of the mid-Eighties, broke it off to become one half of one of the decade’s most famous couples with Bruce Willis. In 1996 she gave up on Hollywood to move permanently to Idaho to bring up her three daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah now 18, 15 and 13. Soon after the marriage broke down but Demi did not.

Her screen persona always has something indesctructible about it. There’s a toughness, there’s a strength, drive, determination. Even when she was the object being traded in Indecent Proposal (Robert Redford’s character wanted to buy her) she was never a victim. She has done plenty of blockbusters – St. Elmo’s Fire, Ghost, A Few Good Men, and in 1996 she became the then highest paid actress in Hollywood getting $12.5 million for Striptease. In the same year she did GI Jane, the story of a woman Navy Seal, shaved head and one-handed press-ups in the mud.

The inescapable thing that she gives us is strength. She gives us steel. She gives us no compromise. What does she think of this perception of her? “Do you know what I think obviously there must be some strength because this is the response from more than a handful of people. It’s not something I’m conscious of, wanting to come across strong. But I think it’s there. It’s part of some of the tough and challenging experiences I’ve had in my life. That I’ve overcome them has created a sort of strength. But I never get the idea that I come over like a warrior. In a funny way I understand it and it’s also just so opposite of where I see myself and how I feel myself.”

She looks right at you as she talks and she’s not afraid to be looked right at herself. Her character in Mr Brooks – “a very twisted tale” – is the detective hunting down serial killer played by Kevin Costner, who is all the more spooky because of his friendly upstanding neighbourly qualities. She loves the juxtaposition of kindly Costner’s regular guy image and murderous unhinged calculating killer. Her character was in the throes of a divorce and was being manipulated by her husband for millions of dollars because she comes from a super privileged background. “So there were those aspects of this particular character that were very different to my life. Because she came from privilege she behaved differently. She had a rage that terrified me. She is someone who is out of control allowing their emotions to run the show. I have never been that, it is probably my biggest fear,” she says laughing her smoky crackling laugh. “She came from a safe place so she could go into those rages. Maybe some part of the privilege that she came from was a cushion that allowed that.”

Interesting that in her dramatically intense soap opera bad childhood that was filled with huge emotions of betrayal, loss, despair, disappointment, she felt she must contain her emotions. “There was one element in the story that got lost. It was an interesting character detail. She liked to pay for sex, which for me was fascinating. It was never really thought of as a woman’s choice so it was really twisted in that juicy kind of way.” The irony is not lost on her that this is the reverse plot of Indecent Proposal. She seems excited about how twisted this movie and her character is in the way that only someone whose life is far from twisted can.

Her first Hollywood ‘comeback’ was in a bikini in Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle. Impressive. Even more impressive was her role in Estevez’s Bobby as alcoholic nightclub singer Virginia Fallon which it has been said was based on her mother who was called Virginia, who was a drunk but not a singer. “He did know my mother. I’m not sure if it was specifically her but I think there were interesting elements. When he first sent me the script it was really to look at it, to see what I thought of it, it wasn’t necessarily to be in it.”

At that time Moore was in Idaho and didn’t know that this was to be part of her way out of there. The fact that Emilio had decided to call a fading singer Virginia Fallon gave it an extra piquancy. “The irony wasn’t lost on me,” she says drily. “It was a gift. Whatever parallels there were with me and my mother it was a really positive way for me to get more inside the pain that she was going through.” And the pain that you were going through. Your upbringing was hard. “It had some not so great moments. But I wouldn’t say hard. There are people who have had it worse and people who have had it not so bad. The one thing I can say is through all the nuttiness I was loved by my mum and my father.”

Her mother was only 19 when she had her. She didn’t grow up with her biological father. He left her mother before she was born. Until she was 15, Demi, named Demetria after a shampoo that her mother saw in a magazine, believed Danny Guynes was her father when in fact it was Charles Harman, a cocaine addicted vending machine salesman from Texas. Was she hurt not to have been told? Confused that for 15 years the man she thought was her father turned out to be not? “Yes and no. It was the norm of a certain kind. It was what I knew. Certainly not what I would want for my children but if I didn’t step out of how hurtful that was it would have been mind twisting for me. There were many insecurities and doubts but if I take a step back I know they made the best choices they could. They thought they were doing the right thing.”

She and her brother Morgan were constantly relocated. Guynes job as a salesman meant they moved 30 times before she was 15 and she was never in the same school for one year. She learnt to assimilate fast, to not make friends because she was going to lose them. By the time she was 12 she was cross-eyed and had to have an operation to correct a lazy eye. Then she got a kidney disease called nephrosis. The drugs she took caused body fluids to build up in her body so much that she couldn’t stand. The disease can be fatal.

When Danny Guynes committed suicide her mother spiralled into worse alcoholism. Moore became the parent. “You could either be trapped by what was going on around or you could find a way out. I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to register as an opportunity to help elevate and expand us as human beings. When I played Virginia Fallon it was touching a dark place that maybe I didn’t get to go to when my mother was alive, my own compassion for the pain she lived with… There was a lot of ugliness to the character of Virginia and I felt sad for that. You don’t come into this life wanting to be anything other than happy.”

It’s as if whatever unhappiness she suffered as a child she wants to touch it, understand it as an actor but never live through it. She always wants to make the choice to be happy. Sounds simple and extremely complicated. What she doesn’t want to carry with her is bitterness and she doesn’t, yet she so easily could. Bitterness would have been the easiest thing. “If I look back at my past I look at those things as my gifts. Some of my lowest points were the most exciting opportunities to push through to be a better person.” Do you mean growing up? “No, not even growing up. If I continue to peel back the layers of myself I think we all want the same things. We all want to feel loved and feel a part of but we all have self doubt no matter where we came from.” Did the extremities of your upbringing push you further away from the self doubt? “We weren’t dirt poor but we didn’t have a lot of money. I entered this career having no background or connection to acting. I had so little I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the risk.”

She was inspired to try acting by Natassja Kinski who was a neighbour.

She had little experience but a pile of determination. She married a singer called Freddy Moore in 1980, divorced him a few years later but kept his name.

“Once tasting a bit of success it’s more challenging. We have to continue to be willing to take a risk so that we don’t get too safe. Unwillingness to risk failure is always there but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose. So the better place to keep yourself in is one out of your comfort zone, willing to try even at the risk of failing. And that’s not natural to me at all.” She laughs and raises her perfect eyebrows at herself, “In fact it’s completely unnatural.”

Perhaps this reassessing herself has come through her interest in the kabbalah which teaches you to put yourself in a position to do what you least expect. Perhaps she has never known what a comfort zone is, so it is in fact completely natural to her. Looking over her life it seems it has been filled with risk, her career, her relationships, What does she think? What were the most exciting risks to her? “I don’t know,” she says trying to think. “I don’t live in what I was. What do you think have been my biggest risks?” I suggest that getting naked when she was hugely pregnant and posing for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 caused a worldwide gasp. At the time it was not deemed possible to be sexy and pregnant. She broke the taboo. She dismisses this. After all, it was one day of her life. And although it might have had a significant effect on changing people’s perceptions and others have copied it since, most recently Myleene Klass, it didn’t seem to involve personal growth for her. “I would say all of my movies were risks even if they didn’t necessarily work in a way that it was a great movie that you would have liked. I would say Striptease was a huge risk for me. It was difficult for me to do the dancing and the actual stripping, contrary to what anybody elses opinion would be. And the gain from it was different to what I would have imagined. While the external public perception was hyper focused on what I was being paid for taking my clothes off ($12.5 million), for me it was the intense focus of connecting with my body and myself in a sensual sexual way, in a way that I’ve never felt before. I was always very uncomfortable with my body. And it was to do with being female and seductive.”

It’s hard to believe that Demi Moore couldn’t have been comfortable in her perfect body. Her long delicate limbs, her pale flawless skin, are all just fleshy enough. “No, I was not. I’ve always felt much more self conscious. I felt I had to push myself to feel more feminine, a different kind of feminine. If you look at everything I’ve done before that, there weren’t a lot of highly sexual roles.”

Indeed, she was always the sweet thing or naughty thing, the vixen or victim. She was the object not the predator. “Being on stage in this character and the way in which I had to use my body made me find my sexuality. In the same way when I did GI Jane it allowed me to find a connection with the masculine part of myself.” The two films came out back to back in 1996 and indeed showed a kind of schizophrenia, absolute opposites and extremes that met in Moore. “It was fascinating. It helped doing Striptease first. I took a lot of criticism, a lot of heat, got hit really hard for both of these films, I think because there was a lot of money attached to it.” Her eyes downcast she seems embarrassed about the money rather than proud of setting a new standard for female stars. That was your gimme period I say, as in gimme more. She chuckles, a little slowly, a little uncomfortably, waits to see if I’m going to criticise. Instead I say there’s nothing wrong with asking for what you want. Hollywood male superstars were certainly being paid at least that. Bruce Willis certainly was. “Yes, having greater desire, does that make you more selfish, or does that give you more opportunity to give?”

Certainly her demands were not seen as altruistic. People were nasty, people were jealous, the bubble had burst. “Both these movies combined to give me some big lessons. I feel I betrayed women with Striptease and men with GI Jane. That wasn’t my intention but I feel that’s how it was perceived. But yes, in that sense I challenged the comfort zone. The heat hurt her. She was not indestructible. After all even now she looks sad about this. Not wanting to stay in the sadness she says brightly, “Where I am now is probably one of the moments of greatest risks in my own career. When I stepped away from working just to be with my children I never really thought about the ramifications of defecting my career.”

What was the biggest risk, going to Idaho, abandoning the career, or coming back? “When I realised I needed to be with my kids in one place for whatever amount of time it didn’t feel like a risk in terms of my career because it just wasn’t what my priority was. It was just my children were important to me. They were little, aged from about five to eleven. It wasn’t about am I giving up work it was about my children were important to me.”

What made you decide to stop and move permanently to Idaho? “We announced our separation and my mother died. I went off to do a film after this called Passion Of Mind. The film didn’t get the best of me and my children weren’t getting the best of me. I was not in the mix. The film had been an extraordinary script and an OK film, but it wasn’t about that. I was the product of divorced parents who weren’t present for me. I realised that if I wasn’t present for them I was going to have bigger issues with them later.” She did not want to let history repeat itself. She was left alone at a young age and felt she had too much responsibility too quickly and she grew up too fast. “I didn’t want to work and drag my kids with me while they were trying to cross this huge transition. I wanted them to become as stable and as confident as possible. I’m grateful that I had the ability to do that. There are people that go through this and don’t have the financial means, but I did. It wasn’t a risk, it was the right thing to do.”

Her mother was only 54 when she died of cancer. Moore had tried to help her with her alcoholism and their relationship had become frustrated because her mother didn’t seem to want the help she needed. Moore moved the whole family to a motel in New Mexico so she could be with her in the last weeks. The fairy tale marriage with Willis was over and she had not left her career on a high note. “The bigger risk was stepping back into this world that I’d left at a point where I’d faced the harshest criticism I’d ever faced in my career. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to come back. My children though kept asking, are you ever going to work again. Maybe they saw that they were missing that piece of me. It was a big part of who I am.” Were you missing it? “A little bit. I was very happy just being in Idaho. I also realised we can get too comfortable. A sanctuary becomes a hiding place and that’s not a benefit to anybody.”

Her comeback movie was Charlie’s Angels. Was that another risk? Appearing in a bikini alongside women a decade younger? “I didn’t worry about being with younger women and I didn’t have time to think about being in a bikini. I was asked if I could start working a month earlier than originally planned so I didn’t have time to obsess about that.” But wasn’t there a part of your life when you were obsessed with exercise, like running 20 miles a day? “Long ago when I did Striptease and GI Jane.” She pauses to peel back more layers. “It wasn’t just about the parts requiring it. I was much more driven and obsessive about physical exercise and dieting. It peaked. After GI Jane I was burnt out. I stopped work and I stopped exercising. I realised I needed to come from the inside and find a sense of peace. I had manipulated and created something but it wasn’t coming from a place that was really grounded. I realised being thin did not equal happiness.” Did you find it only fuelled your insecurities? “Of course, it’s never going to give us the confidence because that has to come from a connection that’s more spiritual. You can call it God, you can call it the Light, but it’s something greater than you. Greater than what is tangible because what is tangible is finite. I’ve stopped trying to control it.”

She found that the happier she was and the less she tried the better she felt and looked. Although the tabloids would have it another way. Some cite she paid $3 million for her new body. Does she find that a compliment? “No. It’s irritating. And it isn’t true. To fight it feels futile because I feel it perpetuates the myth. But really,” she says with mounting anger, “the culmination for me was that I had my knees done. When I read that I thought wow, should I have been worried about my knees, I didn’t realise they were so bad. There were multiple reports that I’d had them done.” Her knees are readily available besides me. She invites me tod examine them for the scar. She bends them and shows me how in certain positions the tiniest bit of fat pokes over her knee creating a wrinkle, but it’s not a scar. I put my finger across it to check. I can feel no ridge, just smooth skin. A couple of businessmen in the corner look alarmed why I would be stroking Demi Moore’s knees. But she seems to find it amusing. “It’s not just my knees. They say I’ve had multiple face surgeries. I was in getting a facial recently and there were reports that I’d been in there for countless hours saying I’d had surgical procedures. Am I going to sue? Do they want to examine my entire face and look for marks? Do I really care? Well, I have some ego and I think are they trying to say I can only look good if I bought it.”

Twenty years in the media have not hardened her to this. She composes and says, “Also I feel that this separates women. The media is trying to perpetuate something else saying you can’t have this because you can’t afford it.” She’s adamant she has had nothing done to her face. She allows me to stare at her very close. She has fine lines around her eyes. No evidence of any work. She also assures me she’s never had lypo. There is no steeliness. Here are the insecurities that created the steel. I tell her she has to take it as a compliment that people think that she looks so good.

I wonder if the focus on her looks has made her introspective. At 44 she’s too old for the bimbo role but not old enough to be the matriarch, the grand dame. Although in her next film, Flawless, which reunites her with Michael Caine 23 years after they starred in the kitschy sex farce Blame It On Rio, she plays a woman who is “Brittle. It’s a woman who’s given up on her personal life. It’s set in the Sixties where a woman striving for a career in the corporate diamond world was unheard of. It was interesting to explore her. She’s strong but not really. She’s brittle.”

It’s as if playing brittle gets rid of the brittleness in her own life. “I’d like to do something more vulnerable. People associate me with strong but that can be limiting. I suppose if I really want it I’ll have to go hunt it down myself. If you want it you have to be proactive and do the work. We hear all the complaints. There aren’t enough roles for women my age. So I think let’s figure out creative ways to find these. My goal though is to continue to grow as a human being, to find more ways in which I can be a better giver in all aspects. To be a better wife, better mother, better friend, better sister.” Do you feel more able to be loved now? “Yes, I do. I feel like I have a great gift of being with somebody who loves me and supports me. We share a connection that allows me to dig deeper within myself and look at things that I was afraid to look at.” She says this with absolute certainty, even talking about Kutcher she seems to shiver with strength and softness at the same time.

She met Kutcher when she was in New York doing a photo shoot and he was hosting Saturday Night Live. There was already quite a buzz about Kutcher. He was funny and gorgeous. successful and popular and amusing. His show Punk’d was by this time an MTV classic. He was a star of That ’70s Show and was just about to embark on a successful movie career. A group of friends went out to dinner so it didn’t feel awkward, like a set-up. At the time everyone thought she had such a good relationship with her ex-husband Bruce Willis and that they were about to get back together again. They got married by a Kabbalah rabbi in 2005. Was she looking for someone or did he take her by surprise? “I actually think I was at a point where I thought I was never going to find anybody. I don’t come with baggage I come with trunks and as the mother of three teenagers I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself but dating seems kind of silly, I thought I just don’t know how to do this.”

Yet she has learnt to deal with those trunks and unpack the bitterness and anger that makes them such a heavy load. We see happy smiling pictures of Moore, her daughters, her ex-husband, and he current husband smilingly skiing or on family days out. Kutcher never tried to be a father or replace Willis. The children call him M.O.D – My Other Dad. What’s the formula for getting on so well with her ex? “People forget that you get brought together with someone because you share a connection and that there was a depth of love and it gets buried when things go off on another path. It’s easy to forget that and stay attached to the negativity, the bad stuff, the pain. But you do have a choice. You can stay connected to what was shared and find a new form with which to share it.”

She’s done exceptionally well with her very modern family who all go on holiday together? Does she think it depends on how badly it ended on how well the relationship continues? “No. It takes too much work not to get over it. The energy it takes not to forgive is exhausting, it’s miserable. You just have to want to move on. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s lots of emotions and sensitivities to deal with. But if you hold on and don’t forgive it’s destructive. In our case we placed our children as a priority. After all, each of them was created by a piece of us and I never wanted them to think what happened to us had any reflection on them. My parents used my brother and I as pawns. I was determined that that would never happen with my family. I have daughters so obviously I support a daughter’s relationship with their father because it could dictate choices that they would later make.” She gives a haunted little chuckle. “I was the parent with my parents. I took it all on.”

So many things have been written about her getting together with Ashton. The age difference. The fact that she was 15 years older than him. The fact that she was once one half of a famous celebrity couple that ruled the tabloids long before there was Bennifer, Bradgelina or Tomkat.

“On paper if somebody had said you are going to be marrying somebody who is 25 as he was then, who sees a woman who has three kids as a bonus, I would have laughed. I would never have known that this man could have existed.” Who he was was evident very early on. That first night that the big group went out to dinner. “I stepped out of the room to call my children to say goodnight. I was on he phone to them saying I love you and I miss you guys and there he was. He stood there and he looked right at me and he said, “That is the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” He paused, then closed the door. So I knew I had encountered someone really different. I just knew. There was something really different.”
Did you feel that you knew him before in another life? (As he says of her). “I felt there was a connection. I feel like I have been with him the whole of my life. That’s how it feels. I feel so so blessed. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I asked the universe for a partner, somebody who I could really share everything with.”

When she talks about Kutcher her voice is so warm it’s almost purring. She could talk about him all the time really, and how great and solid and clever and sexy he is.

Do you want a baby with him? “We would love that. It would be just fantastic. We are doing lots of practising for that. And you can’t complain about practising with him.” She giggles a sweet girlie giggle. “I don’t know what I’ve done, what merit I’ve possibly had, that the universe could reward me by putting us together.”

I think you have a genuine happy ending. “I do, I do.” You feel happy for her. You feel happy that such love exists. In fact mesmerised.